Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday June 05, 2011 @02:25AM
from the can-you-ban-it-from-the-web-too-please dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In France, radio and television news anchors are no longer allowed to say the words 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' on air, unless the terms are specifically part of a news story. The ban stems from a decree issued by the French government on March 27, 1992, which forbids the promotion of commercial enterprises on news programs."

You seem to be forgetting presenters who re-direct viewers to their twitter or facebook page and/or ask them add their views to an ongoing discussion of some topic posted/tweeted on those sites. Frankly, I think it's a good move. Why should Facebook and Twitter get free advertising and becomes more popular than they already are? It's hindering emergence of other sites... hmm, non-US sites.:)

It surprises me that they use Twitter at all. The BBC has hashtags for most of its popular shows, but when you actually read what people post it is at least 75% inane, libellous or obscene. I tried it watching Question Time (political QA session with questions from an audience) the other day and there was a steady stream of profanity and "tits or GTFO" posts. Back when it started the BBC used to ask people not to swear, but they stopped when it became obvious that whenever they did the response was invariab

If it weren't for France there wouldn't be an America. Seriously, Philosophically, financially, and with their military help America was established. Then they turned around and did for themselves too.

There is an epic amount of "French Bashing" going on in the USA. I find it repulsive because I have always liked the French. I ran into lots of them in MMORPGs such as Asheron's Call, particularly the Dark Tide server. They were fun to fight and fight with. They are a bit quirky and tend to stick together, but can be very friendly if you aren't a tool.

Its highly important that everyone isn't of the same mindset on planet Earth. I could explain this, but I would rather do it and get an A for it in some damn sociology class, than waste it here.

Just think if we would have followed the French's lead on Iraq, we wouldn't have invaded and wasted trillions of dollars in a war that we get absolutely NOTHING from. Leave it to the Right wingers to smear them after they didn't play ball with them. AND leave it to capitalists to make every socialist country a villain. BTW, I am not a socialist or capitalist. I believe the intelligent way to govern is to cherry pick what works well and use that for the benefit of EVERYONE, not just the aristocracy.

Also, contrast the life of the average Frenchman to ours. They live longer, have more free time, have medical and JOBS. I think they are infinitely freer than the corporate wage slaves that we are here. Every time a Rightwinger brays about how socialism doesn't work, pointing to the fall of Russia, I think of the French. In fact, I think of a lot of European countries that are socialists and they haven't "failed".

With that all said, I cheer them on if they want to keep the news newsworthy and not yet another plug for company X. After all, the airwaves belong to the public, not to any one person, and if you want to use it, you have to follow the rules the public agrees on. If you think our TV has "free speech" to say whatever they want, you are insane. We have something called the FCC and there are censors in this country and have been for decades. After the "Patriot Act", I don't think we have room to talk smack to ANYONE about freedoms. Once we stop our own government from goose stepping all over our Constitution, we might have a leg to stand on.Until then, we need to seriously STFU.

Also, contrast the life of the average Frenchman to ours. They live longer, have more free time, have medical and JOBS.

Actually, the unemployment rate in France is higher than in the US (9.5% vs. 8.7%), and it is very difficult for young people to find jobs there. If you recall, there was a major bout of riots [wikipedia.org] in 2009 over it, and smaller riots have been occurring since then.

Just think if we would have followed the French's lead on Iraq, we wouldn't have invaded and wasted trillions of dollars in a war that we get absolutely NOTHING from. Leave it to the Right wingers to smear them after they didn't play ball with them.

I don't think we should have invaded Iraq (and I didn't think so at the time), but did you know that France had strong economic ties [bbc.co.uk] to Iraq at the time that probably contributed to their decision to oppose the war? It would be similar to the US opposing war on Saudi Arabia, or the UAE (which we certainly would). Those kind of decisions are made the same way in France as they are in the US.

The difference is that this is actually not a bad rate for France [indexmundi.com]. There has been high unemployment here for decades. As such, there are many social provisions for it (some would argue too many).

In the US, if you've been out of work for a year or more and don't have any savings or family to fall back on -- you're on the street.

I ran into lots of them in MMORPGs such as Asheron's Call, particularly the Dark Tide server. They were fun to fight and fight with.

Unfortunately none of these games allowed us the weapon that our history taught us to excel at : the cow catapult !

They live longer, have more free time, have medical and JOBS. I think they are infinitely freer than the corporate wage slaves that we are here.

yes, yes, yes and no. Our unemployment rate (~9.5%) is higher than the one in US (8.7%) but I think it is easier to live as an unemployed person in France than as someone with the minimum wage in US. however, the media I read have some bias so I cannot be sure.

Every time a Rightwinger brays about how socialism doesn't work, pointing to the fall of Russia, I think of the French. In fact, I think of a lot of European countries that are socialists and they haven't "failed".

That is something that has always amazed me. In France we have two words with completely different meaning : socialism and communism, th

Yes, but our enlightened leaders use the same trick. He promised to reduce unemployment and just changed the metric. Now they only count people "actively looking for a job" which means people who accept to go twice a month to useless interviews sometimes far away from where they live in order to get some unemployment aid from the government.

Here is a question for you guys. What was the story with the IMF chief from France, the one that ended up in some frame up job in NY?

What is best in this story is that he was leading the polls for the 2012 presidential elections in France, but now he is pretty much toasted. But he is a socialist only

Here is one for you, the next time some Yank gets smart assed with you about anything, just whisper "Patriot Act" to them. If they have half a brain they will STFU.

The Patriot act is a fucking shame. More even now that Obama called it crucial for US security. But we also have anti-terrorist policies that would frighten you as well. Here we have military with assault rifles patrolling in airports and subway stations. Warrent-less searches is the norm here and wiretapping happens without even a debate. Just don't overestimate us. When the post-9/11 world fell into madness, we followed just like most western countries.

Also, contrast the life of the average Frenchman to ours. They live longer, have more free time, have medical and JOBS.

Not so sure about jobs, French unemploment rate is at 9.7% [irishtimes.com] which is about average for the Euro zone with 9.4% (pdf) [europa.eu]. Europe as a whole is just as screwed as the US, some countries like Germany are doing okay (6.1%) while others like Spain (20.7%) are completely screwed.

Anyway, I've found unemployment rates to lie quite a lot. Look at the US data [bls.gov], sure, compared to last year the unemployment rate is down from 9.6% to 9.1% but the participation rate is also down from 64.9% to 64.2%. So in reality less people

Well, you put the emphasis on JOBS yourself. Working hours only matter if you have work and the governments are going to have huge problems getting their budgets back in balance without cutting in public healthcare. Portugal, Ireland and Greece would all be bankrupt by now if not for the EU and the emergency loans are now putting the whole EU on the line as collateral. It's a make-or-break strategy, either they all rebound or it'll all come crashing down. The EU is not "too big to fail", the 1929 crash show

If we would have followed the French's lead on Iraq, we wouldn't have invaded and wasted trillions of dollars in a war that we get absolutely NOTHING from

So, you think liberating a nation from a tyrannical dictator is worth nothing at all?

I think the US did two things wrong in Iraq, one was overstaying their welcome and the other was leaving the job half done. Should have gone to Syria and Iran as well. Not to mention the religious dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. Religious freedom is a basic human right and that includes being free FROM religion.

You should say "liberating a nation from a tyrannical dictator that used to be our puppet". You and so many others either ignore or are completely ignorant of our previous Middle East policies. While us and the Soviets got into some deadly dick measuring contest, we armed the living shit out of that region. We put some serious weapons in the hands of lunatics just as long as they sang and danced the "oil" tune for us. These maniacs then ran roughshod over their own people, their neighbors and anyone that go

The root of many problems in the Middle East was the absurdly inept way the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was handled. The division of the empire [wikipedia.org] ignored the complex religious and ethnic divisions in that region.

Basically, Iraq is a country that should have never been created. Its territory should have been split between Kurdistan, Syria, and Persia. As it stands now, it can be either a police state or anarchy.

However, this does not justify keeping Saddam in power. If Bush Sr. had a little bit of compet

Are you serious? Do you blame women for being weak when their men beat them too? If we lived next to the Germans when they came Blitzing through, we would have surrendered too. There wasn't a lot of choice in the matter either. You obviously are no student of history and just how advanced the German war machine was.

German engineering + War; think about it.

French life style + War; bad combination. Unless they are invading to plant vineyards, and make better coffee, or milk our cows to make some cheese, I don

Please give France back the Statue of Liberty. You don't deserve it anymore. You rape the liberties France helped you with against the British. You slap the the French soldiers in the face who died next to yours in the first Iraq war.

You try to convince the world that you alone won world war one and two, ignoring the many other countries and men that you were in a coalition with. Canadians, Polish, Russians, French, Dutch, English, South African. The list goes on and on and you could not have done it alone.

The one war you lost was Vietnam and you couldn't deal with it the moment you went at it alone.

Normally, I would ignore anyone who didn't realize that a comment modded +5 Funny was in fact a joke, not intended as a literally true statement. But first, you're wrong in interesting ways. I mean that as a compliment--people who are right or wrong in uninteresting ways are so boring as to be de facto nonentities, and people who are right in interesting ways are exceedingly rare. Second, you express yourself coherently. I therefore deem you to be worth talking to.

This isn't limiting freedom of speech. Granted it sucks (I know in Australia we've had all kinds of stupid/funny "if we get x followers on twitter we'll do y" things on breakfast shows that this sort of thing would stomp on were it here), but it doesn't have anything to do with civil rights.

This isn't limiting freedom of speech. Granted it sucks (I know in Australia we've had all kinds of stupid/funny "if we get x followers on twitter we'll do y" things on breakfast shows that this sort of thing would stomp on were it here), but it doesn't have anything to do with civil rights.

How do you figure it's not limiting freedom of speech or, at least, freedom of the press?

It might be acceptable or justified based on whatever doctrine you're working from. But if you can't say X, Y or Z, it's a limitation, any way you slice it.

Generally, if you have to say something or can't say something, it impacts your freedom, but more importantly implements a level of control on you. And, generally, if someone went to the trouble of lobbying the government to control your speech, it will definitely so

it still isn't. "Amazon.com" (or "amazon.fr" in that case) can't be named in similar circumstances ( "Here is our review of "Harry Potter XIII - Resurrection". You can buy it at amazon.fr" isn't allowed, 'Amazon's worth increasing 10 fold on the stock market after Bezos calls his kid "Kindle"' is actually allowed.)

Yes, but where is the line drawn at? If they include the headlines along with the various gimmics, could they be seen as news shows? Sure they're trashy, almost as much as our current [yahoo.com] affairs [ninemsn.com.au] shows (Non-Aussie's: these two shows are tabloid crap, flitting from moral outrage to shameless advertisement in the space of a few seconds [youtube.com]). But I doubt that a sense of taste comes into legalities

They passed this law because it was unfair competition against other social websites. They wanted to ban the use of the "And find out more about our show on our Facebook page!" at the end of every TV show or whatnot. Now they'll have to say "And find out more about our show on the social websites!" I think it's actually a good thing and make people more aware that FB and Twitter are not the only websites on earth.

Please tell me how you figure this isn't a limitation on freedom of speech?? It's not just a limitation on freedom of speech. It's a directive that requires news organisations to make the news vaguer. If an issue has been discussed on Facebook, and they are forced to say "social network sites" and not identify the social network, that's diluted the information. Idiotic!

I read the summary/article differently, your case is allowed. What it disallows is using broadcast time to advertise Facebook and twitter pages for the channel, which is hardly censorship of information or an attack on free speech. I would think it closer to age restriction censorship which is good or in very lest necessary.

Anti (some) Americans rant: Seriously how can you use the idea of freedom of speech to make it sound like a good idea to allow advertising or promotions of companies into news broadcasts

Anti (some) Americans rant: Seriously how can you use the idea of freedom of speech to make it sound like a good idea to allow advertising or promotions of companies into news broadcasts.

Freedom of speech protects speech you like as well as speech you don't like.

That aside, this also bans a news channel from saying something like, "Follow us on Twitter at @newschannelname for the latest news updates direct to your phone." How does it benefit anyone to forbid that?

That aside, this also bans a news channel from saying something like, "Follow us on Twitter at @newschannelname for the latest news updates direct to your phone." How does it benefit anyone to forbid that?

In the same way that it benefits us that the anchor doesn't follow every sentence with "brought to you by Carls Jr."

Now maybe you don't see a benefit to that but I sure do. I don't want to get my news from a 3rd party ad company that has nothing to do with anything, and to be honest, I'm genuinely sick of

It is obvious that Americans hate the idea of news that just reports the facts so it's no surprise you use that defense. Not all speech is free and in fact the constitution arguably didd not originally make it free. It just made it the state's decision to censor you not the federal government's decision. But the news is something that people take seriously. It affects how they vote and how they live. You can't just let a news organisation take money to say things for a corporation, to out right lie or censo

That aside, this also bans a news channel from saying something like, "Follow us on Twitter at @newschannelname for the latest news updates direct to your phone."

Why not use Internet standards and a subscription model they control themselfves instead of delegating that to a private company? "Follow us by subscribing to our mailing list at http://newchannelname.fr/mailinglist"

Note that free Twitter by SMS does not exist in France due to the price of sending SMS. Only people with a smartphone and an Internet plan can use Twitter on their phones.

How does it benefit anyone to forbid that?

How does it benefit anyone to give the control of our communications and web site authentication to a single private company

That aside, this also bans a news channel from saying something like, "Follow us on Twitter at @newschannelname for the latest news updates direct to your phone." How does it benefit anyone to forbid that?

No, the channel can still do it, just as a proper advertisement, and not mixed with the news. Seems OK to me. Advertisement as news is just fraud.

Please tell me how you figure this isn't a limitation on freedom of speech?? It's not just a limitation on freedom of speech. It's a directive that requires news organisations to make the news vaguer. If an issue has been discussed on Facebook, and they are forced to say "social network sites" and not identify the social network, that's diluted the information. Idiotic!

I read the summary/article differently, your case is allowed. What it disallows is using broadcast time to advertise Facebook and twitter pages for the channel, which is hardly censorship of information or an attack on free speech. I would think it closer to age restriction censorship which is good or in very lest necessary.

Anti (some) Americans rant: Seriously how can you use the idea of freedom of speech to make it sound like a good idea to allow advertising or promotions of companies into news broadcasts.

You don't prevent the government from doing things because those things are always good. You prevent it because people have an inalienable right to do them. From a more practical perspective, it's damned near impossible to understand the unseen consequences and the more laws you have the more you don't know what problems are caused by people exercising their rights and what problems are caused by laws themselves. From a more cynical perspective, if there's some asshole lobbyist / politician / special inter

Anti-Euro and various ex-colonies question: how the hell do you still have state-run media? Are you children that need Loving Mother Government to tell you what's going on in the world?

Have you watched any?
[sarcasm]Better run by the government and publicly known as that, than run by megacorporations for their nefarious purposes! [/sarcasm]
Disclaimer: I stopped watching ANY sort of TV years ago.

It's not about news ABOUT Twitter or Facebook. It's about PR related issues. So, the headline "Facebook's Owner, Marc Zuckerberg, killed by frikking bass with lasers he intended to eat" or even "Bill Gate's Twitter account hacked. His password was Chairs4Steve" are still allowed, whereas "Entertainment Industry comes to term with the fact that DRM is contra productive. Read more on our Facebook page" isn't. In the first two, mentioning the sites is relevant. In the last one it's just hidden advertising (Even if might be unwilling).

Why shouldn't a news organization be able to promote other avenues for viewers to receive or submit content to their service? I see no logical difference between "Visit us at CNN.com" and "Visit our Twitter page at twitter.com/CNN" other than the second is an outside service rather than an internal service. It's not a "hidden advertising" issue if the first is allowed, which AFAICT, it is.

Supposing you're getting the "visit us on CNN.com" while watching CNN, it's self promotion (hopefully not only that though) and actually informative. People obviously know your product (CNN) and you are just giving them other channels to consume it. On the other hand, if you advertise private third party services you give them unfair leverage against their competitor (and just because "they are soooo big anyway already" is not an excuse).
In France it is illegal to actually name products and companies, unle

The French TV regulatory agency Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA) insists the French government is simply upholding its laws. “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition?” a CSA spokesperson said in a statement. “This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s openi

There is ONE argument I can make in favor of promoting Facebook or some other social network: When the news in question is ongoing. I.e. something that, if reported on only as part of a normal news broadcast a few times a day, leaves out valuable information of some kind.

The recent devastation in Joplin, Missouri is a perfect example; until I heard that everyone I know there was safe, if homeless, I followed the story using the Facebook page for one of the city's radio stations (KZRG),at their suggestion.

Actually, it's an increase in freedom of speech: there's limited time and resources for speech. Letting commercial companies take over all of it displaces and cancels cultural, philosophical... speech.

"...unless the terms are part of a news story" - you know, the bit from the article that the summary deliberately neglected to mention, in order to provoke reactions just like yours. In fact, the law isn't even aimed at Facebook or Twitter, it just happens to encompass them.

The law is intended to prevent "news" programs from stuffing their stories full of product placement.

I'm looking at this whole thing from a different perspective: proper news flow.
Too many times it happens that journalists obtain some information from Twitter/Facebook and broadcast it specifying the above as sources. With this ban, maybe they will do their job properly and will search for the ROOT source of the story instead of simply mentioning the most popular website as source.
Of course, according to TFA, if the ROOT source IS indeed Facebook or Twitter, they CAN mention that.
As for the "follow us on

You cannot cite companies, brands or such advertising-like terms on a News show, be it Facebook or your Mum's Ice Cream Boot.
And I think it's healthy for our societies to avoid this.
That's all that piece is about. You read it wrong. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech, and in the case of many, everything to do with freedom of thinking.

Product placement is not allowed in state channels, commercial websites are just that, products.

And in Europe, it's taken for granted that this is a reasonable restriction and that the idea of state channels is reasonable.

Most Americans (and probably a lot of Euros) don't grasp that European leftism != American leftism and European rightism != American rightism. There are strong parallels in abstract, but as you cross the pond you see a fundamental change in the cultural gestalt of the relationship between the state and the individual.

On the really broad lines my impression is that the US leaves it to the "invisible hand" of the market to fix everything. In most of Europe we'll employ any regulation we like as long as we treat all competitors equally. The free market is in the sandbox with the rules and limitations we choose, if say we want to clearly separate news from ads we just make a rule saying that you must, even if the "free market" would like to offer you a slush taking great kickbacks on their promotion. Rather than trust a mar

No more follow/like us on twitter or facebook interrupting something generally more interesting.

Seriously the PR departments must be really under pressure to appeal to the new generation, without fully understanding it, to think that we would rather follow them using a facebook or twitter interface rather than there generally well done actual website.

On the one hand, the freedom of speech lover in me thinks that this goes to far, as I do with many things the French do...

On the other hand, I imagine what CNN would be like if they had to report or analyze a story instead of asking what Twitter thinks of a story...

If you are actually interested in news, just watch C-SPAN. Yeah, sometimes it's dry as hell and the callers are often painful, but it actually does a really good job of presenting both sides, and there are no ads. Bottom line: "I heard Rep X say this on the House floor and then Rep Y said this" wins a lot more arguments than "I heard talking heads X and Y scoring points on CNN."

If you're in the DC area, 90.1 FM is C-SPAN radio, and they have XM, webcasting, etc. If you're up late, they play historic Supreme

Not that I agree with the French policy (or RTFS), but it's recently bothered me (in a very slight way) that we now have forms of communication that can only be referred to through the brand name. We could chat, text, fax, phone and blog without referring to a company name, but Tweets and Facebook posts seem harder to generalize. Just saying something's been "posted online" seems too vague. The proper generic verb hasn't been invented yet.

Twitter and Facebook have a large number of anonymous children. They also have a large following of corporate PR, legitimate news announcers, and non-anonymous important dudes (in someone's view). The fact that some news is broken FIRST on twitter and Facebook and the fact that news articles mention it at all is a clear indication of its perceived importance and relevant in the modern world.

You can blog about something without implying you're using a particular company's service. You can't follow someone on Twitter without using Twitter. You can't 'like' someone in Facebook without going through Facebook. These forms of communication can only be referred to through the brand names, because only the brand names provide them.

(But there are generic names... microblogging and friending/networking/liking/following, depending on what you're doing. We just don't tend to use them because microbloggi

There is no generic word, because those communication media are not generic: those are not open communication protocol, instead they are linked to closed platforms. Closed because they totally control your access to your own communications and they can filter as they want.

Some other threads said that forbidding to talk freely about those private networks was against free speech. But I don't see how advertising closed platform that can totally control speech is an advancement.

I believe the proper terms have already been invented. Twitter is a blog which only accepts a terribly limited amount of text. Therefore, if "blogging" is seen as a verb then it also covers message posted to twitter. If that fails then there is also micro-blogging. Even if some people don't believe that that is good enough then I don't see how it is impossible to say "he/she stated that..." or even "he/she stated in a website that..." instead of "he/she tweeted...".

Any objective person can see that saying "Follow us on twitter!" is an endorsement of a commercial service, and it's not legal in France to pepper news programs with adverts like this.

The blogtards and upcoming posters who say "Stupid bans like these don't work" and "Next they will be after McDonalds and Disney" are either missing the point due to a lack of thought, or don't care about the point and just like to criticize France anyway.

Personally, I'm amazed that CSA have finally pulled their finger out and have reminded the broadcasters of their responsibilities.

Wouldn't the news show having a presence on Twitter/Facebook be an endorsement? Indicating that they have said presence isn't so much an endorsement as a statement of fact. Can they mention their website? Is that an implicit endorsement of their web hosting company? The internet providers you might use to reach their site? The companies who manufacture the ethernet and/or wifi devices you might use to access them? Are they endorsing France Télécom when they give out their phone number?

Is hinting at the news agency's website any less an endorsement of a commercial service (of the webhoster, in this case) than hinting at the news agency's Twitter feed is an endorsement of Twitter?

Isn't it obvious that that is completely different?

If they say "more information and breaking stories on our website - hosted by soosmabeet web hosting" then it would be equivalent. Otherwise no, because they're not advertising their hosting service.

On the other hand, to say "follow us on twitter" suggests you that should use twitter, furthers twitter's brand recognition, and promotes twitter as *the* micro-blogging service. This is all great publicity for twitter, and surely you concede that this gives the

It is becoming obligatory that half the news stories have half arsed irrelevant comments from Facebook or Twitter
Unfortunately I suspect our journalists will find a way around minor obstructions like the French promotion laws.

Some examples :
-Logos of trademarks that appear in music clip (and the rest) must be blurred.
-A video announcer cannot promote his own book (example: this can't happen Glen Beck [youtube.com]. Oh, and btw, his analysis of the French riots of 2005 is completely false, ofc. Hello FUD).
-Trailers of films cannot be broadcast on TV as ads (only during emission about cinema)
Generally speaking this comes from the same law: "No Hidden advertising"
You have other reglementations, like 'in average, 6min of ads / hr max', and 'no too noisy ads' (wasn't that a recent proposition from Obama?). More recently, it was decided to stop broadcasting of all advertising on gvt-owned TV channels, which usually account for more than 50% of hearing.
Whether you like or not those laws, comparing them to the Freedom Fries stuff is stupid, and shows that the author ignores French culture...

Before social network deniers are celebrating and saying "We don't need people to be dependent to this shit!", sorry guys, they already are. People are using Tweets for news what have happened *right* now. People are using this short form to communicate more effectively than any public radio/television have ever done. Denying these additional ways of communication between public press and people is stupid and back-crawling. Also there is quite fine line between endorsement/advertisment and just mentioning a

Facebook and Twitter etc can easily be called together as social media, which is part of the news making and gathering today. Actually media today is social as a whole, and there are many means to be in contact in real time. This ban is about commercialisation of the news and not about the contact details given later on the stream.

What we really need are decentralised systems, as we already have for email and to a lesser extent IM with jabber...

While it's almost certainly against the rules to talk about gmail because thats promoting google's business, to talk about the general concept of email is just fine because its an open standard that covers thousands of different providers.

So, have a decentralised equivalent of facebook and twitter, then everyone else would be far better off... No single point of failure, no single company havi

While it's almost certainly against the rules to talk about gmail because thats promoting google's business, to talk about the general concept of email is just fine because its an open standard that covers thousands of different providers.

...I wouldn't mind if "newsmen" would stop reading random goddamned tweets on the air as if they're somehow interesting or relevant. If a tweet doesn't have a congressman's penis allegedly contained within, it doesn't belong on your news show.

Anyway, exactly how do they report a currently hypothetical purchase of say, Twitter by Facebook? "The world's largest social media company, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, has bought another?" Even that is pretty self-explanatory.